Unstable GPU OC, only in wow.

[Icathian]

I have a 970 oc'd to 1500 core 5000 mem.

This overclock is perfect, it runs flawlessly with every other game I play, with no artifacts in benchmark tools, but for some reason in wow its very unstable in a weird way, sometimes I can play for hours np, sometimes I can't play for more than 10 mins without the game crashing and locking my core clock in 2d.

Even lowering the oc to near nothing doesn't make a difference. I've even caught the game crashing once just because of the boost clock, while the card was at its default clock.

I don't really know what to do about it. The only way to run the game flawlessly is to downclock the card by 100mhz, which is extremely annoying.

I really don't think it's the card, as I can play games like fc4, bf4 etc with 0 issues. Is wow just being picky? This wasn't a problem with mop, and with Draenor the graphics got bumped a bit, so I'm kinda lost.

[tehpwner]

From what I've gathered it's solely a WoW issue. I have a factory OC'd 970 and in no discernable pattern the graphics driver would crash (only in WoW). By dropping the clock speed by around 7mhz was I able to fix it (or at least in 3 weeks it hasn't happened again, where-as before it'd happen at least once a day)

EDIT: This one

[Icathian]

From what I've gathered it's solely a WoW issue. I have a factory OC'd 970 and in no discernable pattern the graphics driver would crash (only in WoW). By dropping the clock speed by around 7mhz was I able to fix it (or at least in 3 weeks it hasn't happened again, where-as before it'd happen at least once a day)

EDIT: This one

Hm, I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone in this. My card is also factory oc'd, its a 970 gigabyte g1 gaming. Dropping clocks everytime I wanna boot wow is very annoying though :/

[Vash The Stampede]

Welcome to Doom 3. Lots of people had overclocks in 2004 that worked perfectly fine for other games but Doom 3 stressed it differently. Different games use different parts of the GPU. So one game might run nicely on your overclock, but another might not.

Artifacts can be caused by a lack of cooling or voltage. A common cause for artifacts is not enough cooling on the memory or VRMs. Specifically the memory where most manufacturers just blow hot air over. Trust me video memory can get scouring hot to the touch when under load. If you have the room I would use some thermal tape adhesive and stick some copper heat sinks on the memory. Given that you even have the room, which in most cards there isn't.

I usually just immediately replace the cooler on my graphics cards when I get them. They usually make too much damn noise and do too little cooling anyway.